The girl who blew up castles in the air

The book begins with the fact that Lisbeth Salander and her father, Alexander Zalachenko, are delivered by helicopter to the Salmgren Hospital. Thus, the plot continues from the moment at which the previous part of the trilogy ended.

Salmgren Hospital

After a successful operation to extract the bullet from the head, Lisbeth is placed in the intensive care unit. In two chambers from her lies Zalachenko, whom she wounded with an ax in his house in Hesseborg. Salander ’s stepbrother, the blond giant Ronald Niederman, escapes from the police due to the negligence of the officer who arrived at the scene, sending only two police officers to catch him ^[1] . He steals a police car, taking with him his service weapon . Niederman lets the police on a false trail leading to the south of the country to the border with Denmark , and he seeks help from his accomplices from the Svevelshe MK biker club, who give him the address of their cashier and financial expert Viktor Joransson. Niederman kills Yoransson and his wife, takes 800 thousand kroons belonging to the Svelshel MK from the safe in the basement of their house and hides in the car that did not light up in the police.

Evert Gulberg, the founder and former head of the “Section” - the secret department of the State Security Service , who for many years covered and defended Zalachenko, asks the former ally of the “Section” Fredrick Clinton to become its current head. In order to avoid the emergence of the history of the “Section” to the outside, he proposes to eliminate Zalachenko himself, his daughter Salander and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist .

To begin with, they incline the unsuspecting head of the investigation, prosecutor Richard Ekstrom, to their side. The psychiatrist of St. Stephen's Clinic Peter Teleborian, in whom the Section placed Lisbeth Salander in 1991, convinces Extrem with a false forensic psychiatric examination that Salander should be placed in the clinic, and the sooner the better. The 1991 case report, classified by the SEPO , is supposedly false , and this report is adequate and contains all the reasons that in 1991 Lisbeth was placed in a psychiatric hospital. Who and why replaced the fake report with a copy found by Blomqvist and available to the police is the subject of an alleged investigation, and so far it has not been possible to understand the reasons for the substitution. Extreme is willing to flattery and decides to cooperate with the "Section", hoping to achieve career growth for himself, maintaining contact with such "high-ranking" individuals.

Gulberg, a cancer patient, comes to the hospital to Zalachenko and kills him with three shots to the head. After that, he tries to commit suicide, although he is hospitalized and dies in the hospital for several months, remaining insane. Unlike him, Salander retains all mathematical and speech abilities, but because of what happened, she is transferred to the ward at the very end of the department, to which the guard is assigned. The girl’s lawyer becomes Mikael Blomkvist ’s sister Annika Giannini, who is the only one allowed to visit the patient in the time before the trial .

The “Section”, meanwhile, carefully adjusts the self-hanging of Gunnar Björk, a junior employee of the “Section”, who worked on the 1991 report with Teleborian, just at the moment when Björk was about to leave and lay low. Blomkvist steals a report folder from an apartment and puts his cellphone on the wiretap. The same thing happens with Annika Giannini. Blomkvist delves into the situation and decides to start pretending that the report is lost, in fact, having another copy of it.

Counterattack

Blomkvist contacts Dragan Armansky, who calls Torsten Adclint, the head of the constitutional security department of the State Security Service, and tells him about the case. Adclint and her assistant Monica Figueroola begin their secret investigation. After the situation is confirmed, Edclint contacts the Swedish Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister himself , who approve the investigation and then meet with Blomqvist to exchange information. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice agree on the timing of Bloomquist’s publication, by the start of the Salander trial. Figueroles and Blomqvist have an affair.

Blomkvist convinces Salander to smuggle her Palm Tungsten T3 Pocket PC into her room. With the help of his old friend, Kurdo, Baxi Blomqvist finds a hospital cleaner, Idris Headey, who, for a small fee and the right to keep a cell phone, puts the latter in a ventilation shaft near Lisbeth's ward to provide Bluetooth access to the Internet.

Berger Story

The editor-in-chief of Millennium, Erica Berger, finally decides to tell the editorial staff about her departure to Svenska Morgonposten and moves to a new job. Meanwhile, Henry Cortes, a Millennium reporter, finds material about a Swedish company that orders toilet bowls from companies blacklisted by the UN as exploiting child labor. Subsequently, he also discovers that the owner of the company, Magnus Borgschö, is a shareholder of Svensk Morgonposten, that is, the head of Berger. Blomkvist gives Berger a copy of the report, and she decides to speak out against Borgschö at a board meeting.

In the meantime, Erica Berger begins to receive email threats of a sexual nature. The maniac even bursts into Berger’s house and steals her intimate photos , as well as Cortes’s article. Berger hires Milton Security to protect his safety, and she is provided with Suzanne Linder as a guard. Lisbeth Salander , who is in the hospital, learns about the incident through the Internet and contacts Berger, who gives her access to the SMP editorial board. Soon, Salander discovers that the threats were sent by Berger’s colleague, edited by Peter Fredriksson, who did not arouse any suspicions among Berger herself. Susanne Linder hunts down Fredriksson at Berger’s house and handcuffs him. At Fredriksson’s house, she destroys his hard drive and picks up the stolen goods from Erica’s house. She learns that Fredriksson was a classmate of Berger, whom she once ignored.

However, Fredriksson had already managed to send Cortes Borgschö's article by that time, and the next day he called Berger to his office. Berger insists on his own and leaves the editorial office, parting by ordering journalists to print this article in the NSR. Borgshö and Fredriksson are forced to quit.

One day before the court, Annika Giannini hands Extrem with an explanatory note in which Salander tells her version of the story in 24 pages. The Section understands that Blomqvist hid from them, and sends two employees to the Morgongov printing house , but they are forced to run into the Milton Security patrol. Having reached desperate measures, the "Section" instructs to kill Blomkvist , and for this they hire the Yugoslavs- cutters, the brothers Nikolic, and at the same time toss 200 thousand crowns and cocaine into Blomkvist’s apartment. The latter is taken by cameras installed by the Armansky people in Blomqvist’s apartment. Monica Figueroola and her colleagues manage to prevent the murder, although not without the participation of Michael . Meanwhile, Salander is being transported to a pre-trial detention center .

Court

In court, Annika Giannini systematically destroys the main witness of the prosecutor's side - Dr. Teleborian. She argues that there was a conspiracy in 1991 against Salander , and that he continues to take place. She shows the court the video of Salander , which proves the fact of her rape by Bjurman, which Teleborian attributed to the fruits of the defendant’s imagination . In addition, Teleborian is found to be sworn in a lie due to the demonstration of the magazine Lisbeth Salander from the St. Stephen's Clinic, from which it appears that Teleborian kept Salander bound for 381 days , and not 30. After giving testimony to Teleborian , police officers who came to the court room arrested for possession of child pornography. Ekstrom claims to have been misinformed. The court cancels the decision on the incompetence of Salander and acquits her on all counts.

The released Salander goes abroad to forget everything that happened. She spends several months in Gibraltar , where she visits her financial solicitor Jeremy McMillan. Then she goes to Paris to visit Miriam Wu.

Property Description

As the daughter of Zalachenko, she inherits half of his fortune and property. Lisbeth initially disagrees, but Giannini convinces her that she has no choice. The second half is inherited by sister Lisbeth Camille. Finding an abandoned brick factory in the property inventory, for the repair of which, for suspicious reasons, Zalachenko allocated 440 thousand crowns in 2003, she decides to pay a visit there. There she discovers two killed Russian girls who were left here to die of starvation by Niederman’s accomplices hiding in the Baltic , as well as Ronald Niederman himself, who found refuge here for the time of recent events. While living at the factory, Niderman overcame his fears and considered plans for the murder of his sister, and when she herself came to him, he was surprised at such “God's mercy” ^{[L 3]} . They start a battle, as a result of which Lisbeth nails Niderman to the floor with nails. She suppresses the temptation to kill her brother and induces the head of the Svevelshe MK, as well as the police, to the factory, prudently leaving a bayonet-knife in a prominent place. The biker kills Niederman with him, and then he dies himself, in a panic, having entered into a skirmish with the police.

Salander returns to his apartment in Fiskargatan, in Stockholm , and in the evening Blomkvist comes to her. The book and the trilogy end with Lisbeth deciding to “open the door for him and let him into his life again” ^{[L 3]} .

Protagonists

• Lisbeth Salander is a hacker girl, a victim of a conspiracy of special services that hid her in a psychiatric hospital.
• Michael Blomqvist is a friend of Salander, a journalist for the infamous Millennium magazine.

Minor Heroes

• Alexander Zalachenko is a former GRU agent, a defector, Salander’s father, “a psychopath, a killer and a torturer of women” ^{[L 3]} , according to his daughter.
• Evert Gulberg - founder and former head of the "Section" of the SEPO , the murderer of Zalachenko, is a cancer patient.
• Annika Giannini is Michael Blomqvist 's sister, lawyer for Lisbeth Salander .
• Peter Teleborian is a psychiatrist who wrote false reports about Lisbeth Salander, who was arrested for storing child pornography on his computer.
• Jan Bublansky is the police inspector conducting the investigation.
• Monica Figueroola is an employee of the Department for the Protection of the Constitution of SEPO .
• Erica Berger is the former editor-in-chief of Millennium, the editor-in-chief of Svenska Morgonposten, and Michael Blomqvist ’s mistress and girlfriend.

Stig Larsson Characters

• Svante Branden, a specialist in forensic psychiatry and the head physician of the Swedish State Department of Forensic Medicine, advises Annika Giannini on the report of Peter Teleborian. Stig Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson rented a room from their friend, a psychiatrist named Svante Branden. ^{[L 4]}
• Anders Yunasson, MD Lisbeth Salander's physician at the Salmgren Hospital, is the protégé of Anders Jakobsson, a longtime friend of Stig Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson. ^{[L 4]}
• Kurdo Baksi, publisher of Black and White magazine and Stig Larsson ’s colleague on the Expo newspaper, is present in the book as himself. ^{[L 3]}
• Idris Headey is a very likely misrepresentation of the name of Idris Ahmed, co-author of Stig Larsson in the work “Honor Debate: Feminism or Racism”. ^{[L 5]}

1. ↑ The Glass Key Award: A Literary Mystery Award . Retrieved February 29, 2012.
2. ↑ The Winning Game: 2010 Hardcovers: Facts & Figures 2011 Archived October 2, 2012 at Wayback Machine by Daisy Maryles, Publishers Weekly . Retrieved August 3, 2017
3. ↑ ^{1 2 3 4} Stig Larsson. The girl who blew up castles in the air = Swede. Luftslottet som späängdes / Per. Anna Savitskaya. - Moscow: Eksmo, 2010 .-- 784 p. - ISBN 978-5-699-41303-4 .
4. ↑ ^{1 2} E. Gabrielsson, M.F. Colombani, L. Caverdale. “There Are Things I Want You to Know” about Stieg Larsson and Me. - New York: Seven Stories, 2011 .-- 224 p. - ISBN 978-1609803636 .
5. ↑ Idris Ahmed, Stig Larsson, Cecilia Englund. "Debate about honor: feminism or racism." - Stockholm, 2004 .-- 136 p.